Economic effects of Richard M. Nixon; Chat-GPT nibbles at freelancers’ jobs; Moyn & McManus see an imaginary spectre & call it “liberalism”; conquering child mortality; FRBB economic research conference; very briefly noted; & Hunt on writing essays, DeLong’s notes on probing for full employment, “National Review” as goldbug grift, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-11-17 Fr…
SubStack Notes:
Economics: A very nice paper. But, alas!, too close to a one data-point regression. But this is the way the world works. It would be worthwhile for someone to try to extend this to the whole cross-national dataset used for the central bank-independence literature:
Economics: It looks as though Chat-GPT was a measurable economic thing very early. The depressing things in my eyes are what appear to be larger price effects than quantity-worked effects, and the failure of quality work to be judged as superior to stochastic parrotage:
Moral Philosophy: I confess I do not understand either Michael McManus or Samuel Moyn here.
Yes, liberalism was about “liberty, equality, and fraternity”. But the “liberty” was always tied up with having one’s own sphere of action buttressed by control of one’s own property—resources that were yours to control without let or hindrance. The “equality” was equality before the law—no special castes with privileges—and was that majestic equality that, as Anatole France put it in “Le Lys Rouge”, “forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.” And what kind of “fraternity” can be built on such a foundation? As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his “Souvenirs”: “Although some sort of demagogic agitation prevailed among the workers in the towns, in the country all the landowners… seemed to form a single unit…. Neither jealousy nor pride separated the peasant from the rich man any longer, or the bourgeois from the gentleman; instead there was mutual confidence, respect and goodwill. Ownership constituted a sort of fraternity linking all who had anything, the richest were the elder brothers and the less prosperous the younger; but all thought themselves brothers, having a common inheritance to defend…”
Moyn and McManus might wish that liberalism was a fighting faith that advanced from civil rights and civic equality to political rights and political equality to social rights and a UBI. But that was not where the center of gravity of liberalism was. John Stuart Mill demanded that the poor be sterilize if they could not afford to purchase expensive child licenses, for the sake of the Storm God of the Semites—it was not meet that the productive with their property be taxed to support the unproductive whose parents had generated them through lack of foresight.
Rather, the center of gravity of liberalism.was much more “the liberalism of toleration”, “the liberalism of fear”, and “the liberalism of property”—of what C.B. McPherson called “possessive individualists”.
Thus I think Moyn and McManus are chasing a spectre that never was:
ONE IMAGE: The Conquest of Child Mortality
ONE VIDEO: FRBB Economic Research Conference 2023:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Charles Schultze: Oral History Interview: ‘For an oral history, I’m probably one of the worst, because my memory tends to wipe out details…. Second… inflation… we were struggling with… a modest austerity balancing act…. [Third] a steady expansion in the share of the national economy going to civilian programs… just couldn’t keep going…. had to be at least halted…. In modern terms at least… difficult for a Democratic President. The two put together meant very difficult times, which I don’t think any of us recognized initially…
Noah Berlatsky: Americans Hate the Economy. Americans Love the Economy: ‘It’s not clear how to square positive economic indicators with negative economic sentiment.… If the media were really convincing people that the economy is bad, wouldn’t people spend as if the economy is bad?…
Cecilia Elena Rouse & Lisa Barrow: America Needs Public Investment in Childcare: ‘Externalities…. Investing in children is one of the most productive investments a society can make. Support for child health and education has been shown to yield benefits (positive externalities) for society as a whole…. Between the high costs of childcare, the absence of credit markets to help young parents pay for it, and the pressure on providers to contain costs by paying extremely low wages, the US public sector has more than enough reason to step in with support…
Guy Berger: ‘When does inflation stop being salient? Inflation discourse is divided between data nerds who note recent inflation data is nearly back to normal, and normies who anchor to much lower prices in the not-distant past. The CPI is up >18% over the past 3 years…
Lauren Fedor: Ohio’s rustbelt turns into a magnet for chip fabs: ‘Tech investors say ‘Hi, not Goodbye, Columbus’ as projects worth tens of billions crowd in…
Journamalism: Dan Murphy: ‘White supremacist internet rando: “The Jews are coming for your blond daughters and will replace you with mud people.” Elon Musk: “Exactly!” The New York Times: “We found the most anti-semitic sophomore at Harvard and he's the greatest danger to society”…
GPT-LLM-ML: George Hammond: Investor frenzy will overvalue AI tech start-ups, says early OpenAI backer: ‘Many are ‘investing because everybody else is’ and most will lose money, claims Vinod Khosla…. This year, venture capitalists have invested $21.5bn into AI companies globally, compared with $5.1bn in all of 2022…. [Vinod] Khosla is confident AI will radically change the world… take on 80 per cent of the workload in 80 per cent of all human roles over the next two decades, and will create huge economic value…
Azeem Azhar & Chantal Smith: GPTs for all: ‘LLMs are like databases; they know what they know and struggle to imagine data that they haven’t been trained on; researchers don’t seem to find any evidence of LLMs being able to generalise. But unlike traditional databases, they are non-deterministic, that is you won’t get the same response each time you query them. They also store the data in a high-dimensional latent space, which allows us to explore concepts in that latent space. I think of this as a powerful analog to the “join” operator in traditional databases because connections across concepts, things that are sort-of like something else, is similar to analogic thinking. But these two qualities: the non-deterministic nature and the embeddings in latent space make its behaviours very different to traditional databases. Extremely powerful in some ways, and unhelpful in others…
Neofascism: Dan Drezner: The Authoritarianism Is the Point: ‘Why is the Trump campaign so loudmouthed about its autocratic policy plans?… First-term versions of all the policies listed above generated considerable legal, political, and public backlash. Advertising these policies seems like a great way of mobilizing Trump’s opponents…. For Trump to win, he needs to mobilize and broaden his base more than ever before. One way might try to do that is releasing plans that freak out the very people that his base wants to see freaked out…
Science Fiction: TV Tropes: ‘Zeppelins from Another World: ‘“Hite's Law” states that any historical change used to create an Alternate History will tend towards filling the skies with airships. As he points out, taking this to its logical conclusion, this suggests that The Roaring '20s and The '30s were actually those of an alternate history. As other common features of alternate histories are things like widespread totalitarian ideologies and global social upheaval, well, that would explain a lot about those decades. A corollary of Hite's Law is that rather than bother some random passerby with historical trivia to determine whether or not one is in an alternate timeline, it is much faster simply to look up…
As an Ohio native, I find Lauren Fedor's: Ohio’s rustbelt turns into a magnet for chip fabs, a display of ignorance. The rust belt of Ohio is the northeastern part of the state. Columbus is the capital of Ohio crony capitalism, coddled by Republicans since the days of James Rhodes.
Berger: It was rather a shock to economists to learn that some people think "inflation" means "prices of things I pay attention to are higher than I remember." It means there is more disutility associated with inflation than efficiency losses would suggest.